Soil Testing Scheduled At Former Enamelstrip Site

Environmental testing continues at the site of the former Enamelstrip Corp., 20th and Hamilton streets, Allentown, where, employees said, toxic compounds were dumped routinely more than 23 years ago.

Results of water samples taken from wells near the site showed no evidence of contamination, city health officials said this week. And soil samples from the property, where Holiday Hair Fashions now stands, will be taken in the next three weeks.

The property is in the area under investigation because of a cluster of cases of Burkitt's lymphoma, a rare childhood cancer.

Allentown Health Director Gary Gurian said environmental specialists will test the soil for evidence of potentially harmful chemicals and, if necessary, take steps to prevent their leaching into the city's drinking water and food supply.

With the permission of property owner Ray Holland, the state Department of Environmental Resources (DER) will take soil samples from depths of 10-30 feet, levels at which compounds could enter the city's water supply, Gurian said.

To date, however, there's been no sign of the solvents and chromates an Enamelstrip supervisor and another employee said were dumped onto the ground and into Cedar Creek for at least 14 years before the company closed in 1963.

Water samples taken from an operable and an inoperable well near the site indicated nothing toxic had leached from the Enamelstrip property. There were no volatile organic chemicals or heavy metals in either well sample, Gurian said.

In addition, he said recent water, soil and air tests at the adjacent Union Terrace Park and School area proved, "If there was errant dumping, there is no scientific evidence any potentially toxic chemicals are currently in the drinking water or food chain."

Joseph Pomponi, a field operations supervisor at DER's Bethlehem office, said he believes the area to be free of pollutants because of the 20 or 30 years of flushing by Cedar Creek.

The Enamelstrip property became a target of environmental tests in June, during the Health Bureau's investigation into the cause of the cluster of Burkitt's lymphoma.

Two boys who attended Union Terrace School and a third who lived behind it were diagnosed with the fast-growing cancer within a 1 1/2 -year period.

But Gurian said the soil and water tests on the Enamelstrip property are unrelated to the Burkitt's cases because environmental tests in and around the school showed no hazardous amounts of chemicals.

"For chemicals to have caused a health problem, there had to be a means of exposure in the soil, air or water. Even if there was dumping on the Enamelstrip property, there's no indication it has entered the environment to pose a current risk to children or the public's health," he said.

Enamelstrip's potentially harmful activities during the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s were first brought to the Health Bureau's attention in May by Gordon Sharp, an Allentown resident who said he grew up in that neighborhood.

Questioning the possible link between those activities and the cancer cluster, Sharp urged the bureau to test the area periodically for remnants of the company's dumping, to prevent contamination of city drinking water and soil.

Two former employees of the company, in an article in The Morning Call on June 24, also voiced concern about the dumping they said occurred every day during their 13-and 14-year tenures.

They said a heavy sludge byproduct of the company's steel- and aluminum- stripping process was routed into three above-ground, interconnected settling tanks and gravity-fed into a concrete holding tank beneath the ground. A pipe from the holding tank allowed the sludge, containing acids and chromates, to leach slowly into the creek, they told The Call.

Former Enamelstrip employees told the Health Bureau the underground concrete tank was bottomless and therefore not a current threat, Gurian said.

In addition to the sludge, workers poured several toxic solvents onto the grounds behind the plant, the former supervisor reported in the article.